Papers: the metro exemplar
Los Angeles Times advertising cost
The biggest US metro daily west of the Hudson, and a working model of how every metro ad desk behaves.
The LA Times maintains a media kit site with sections, specs, and audience material, but no open print rate card was publicly posted at retrieval: print rates come from the ad desk. That makes the LAT the useful exemplar of the metro tier, where the meter (column inches, day, section, color) is standard and the rate is a conversation.
Source: Los Angeles Times media kit (mediakit.latimes.com), retrieved Jul 31, 2026.
Rate posture
Quote-only
Quote-only; media kit site publishes specs, sections, and audience material; print rate card supplied by the ad desk on request.
Source: Los Angeles Times media kit (mediakit.latimes.com), retrieved Jul 31, 2026.
Cheapest published figure
None
Quote-only; no open print rate card publicly posted at retrieval.
Verified 2026-07-31. Recent changes: None verified.
How a metro rate card differs from a national one
Same grid, different dials. A metro card meters the same column inches but slices by geography: full run versus zoned editions covering slices of the metro, plus community weeklies sold from the same desk. Zoning is the metro tier’s gift to an SMB: a Pasadena remodeler does not need Orange County, and a zoned buy prices accordingly. Ask the desk explicitly which zones exist, what each zone’s circulation is, and the per-inch rate per zone; then run the arithmetic in the estimator and compare cost per useful reader, not sticker price.
Deadlines and specs follow the standard patterns (two clocks, PDF/X and ink limits); Sunday and the food and entertainment sections carry the premium positions the desk will pitch first.
Context
Where the LAT sits in a plan
For an LA-market business, the LAT question is zoned-metro versus the local weeklies and the chains’ regional titles; the framework is at local vs national. For day-of-week strategy, the metro tier is where weekday vs Sunday matters most, because metro Sunday editions still carry the insert economy covered at the insert page.
Source: Los Angeles Times media kit (mediakit.latimes.com), retrieved Jul 31, 2026. Sections and zoned products per the media kit site.